(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Texas held the first of the nation's 2022 primary elections on Tuesday. The results aren't all in as I write, and in Texas candidates must win 50% of the votes to avoid a two-candidate runoff for a nomination, so quite a few contests won't be settled until May. Still, everyone is going to be looking for indications of where the parties might be headed. The short answer? Unclear.
Republicans and Donald Trump: The former president was active in Texas, endorsing six candidates for statewide office, 18 for U.S. House of Representatives, and six more for the state legislature. All of those candidates either won or advanced to runoffs. But Trump can't plausibly claim that his endorsements were decisive. He didn't back a single challenger. Most of his support went to incumbents, and incumbents in any office rarely lose primary elections. The rest were in open seats. I don't know whether he selected candidates because he knew they were likely to win, but I can say that open-seat primary elections, especially for down-ballot offices, are the ones in which high-profile endorsements are likely to have the most impact. Voters typically have little information on such elections, so an endorsement may be the best shortcut for choosing a candidate. And party actors may have little reason to choose one candidate over another and may be eager to find a reason to coalesce behind one of several choices.
The two highest-profile races in Texas gave mixed evidence of Trump's clout. In both cases, he endorsed the incumbent. Governor Greg Abbott, who has been accused by some Republicans of being insufficiently conservative, drew two radical challengers and trounced them, receiving two-thirds of the vote (with counting continuing, as is the case for all the races here). On the other hand, the embattled (and indicted) Trump enthusiast Attorney General Ken Paxton failed to avoid a runoff, receiving just 43% of the vote. He'll take on George P. Bush, the son of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and nephew of former President George W. Bush, who has been far more open to Trump than the rest of his famous family.
Trump did not endorse a congressional candidate in the suburban areas north and northeast of Dallas, where incumbent Van Taylor is falling just short of 50%, perhaps because Taylor voted for an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He also didn't get involved in the statewide race for railroad commissioner, where incumbent Wayne Christian is falling a bit short of 50%. In that one, shock value may have worked; it appears that the second runoff candidate will be Sarah Stogner, who made a sort-of-nude campaign video that won her some attention.
Democrats: The headline races for those interested in the ideological split in the party were two U.S. House contests, each with a candidate backed by the prominent young New York progressive Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They didn't wind up telling us much.
In an open-seat district encompassing a thin slice of the state running from Austin to San Antonio, the very liberal ex-Austin city councilman Greg Casar easily won the nomination and will almost certainly be elected in November. But in a more competitive district stretching north from the Mexican border to part of San Antonio, it appears that AOC-backed Jessica Cisneros will need a runoff if she's to oust incumbent Henry Cueller despite an FBI raid on Cuellar's Laredo home in the middle of the campaign. Cisneros had almost defeated Cuellar two years ago, but it appears that she may have lost a bit of ground since then.
Both of these contests seemed to demonstrate the candidates' personal strengths more than the power of ideology. Casar entered the campaign with strong name recognition and local support in the largest part of his district. In the other race, in another sprawling district, Cisneros dominated in the areas in and near San Antonio while Cuellar was strongest near the border.
It's possible that ideology had something to do with that, but it's also a good reminder that part of politics involves people imposing stories for their own purposes to explain election results. And that goes for the Trump stories above. It's hard to know how Abbott or Paxton or anyone else would have done without a Trump endorsement, or had Trump endorsed a challenger. There's nothing wrong with people trying to use elections to prove a point; that's just as legitimate a part of party politics and democracy as voting itself. But we don't always have to believe them.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
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